November 16

I also took journalism in school, at least for awhile.  Our instructor, Steve, had a very wry humor and was good at design as well.  He created a couple of vicious looking school mascots, one of which adorned the new gym floor, the other was painted on the town water tower that stood next to the new Loop 820 that surrounded Fort Worth.  It was an excellent job considering the subject matter he had to work with, but I wonder what outsiders thought as they drove by and looked up and found themselves staring at a maniacal fanged bullfrog.  It was quite possibly the worst mascot in the world, but Steve did a fine job with it.

Putting the school newspaper together was interesting.  It didn’t take long to figure out that writing articles was the easy part, selling ad space took work!  Salli was in this class and we drove around doing ads together.  She was a natural.  Craig and Tommy were also in this class.  Craig could always make me laugh.  I hung out with Tommy now and then.  I seem to remember catching crawdads for the first time in a creek near his house.  And even in journalism there were UIL competitions.  I actually won something in the UIL headline writing one year.  Perhaps my creativity was fueled by alcohol, because that was the first year I got drunk.  I think it was also the first year I blacked out.  Craig and Tommy managed to sneak a fifth of some sort of whisky along on the trip.  Once we were in the room and unpacked they had to figure out how to hide the booze from prying eyes and hotel maids.  They found a grill over the air filter and stuck the bottle behind it.  That night we all made mixed drinks.  Keep in mind that up to this point in my life you could take the amount of alcoholic beverages I had consumed and put them in a small beer can.  But I really enjoyed the liquor.

Strangely enough my memory of that night and other’s memories differ a bit.  I recall everyone else being asleep and me still wandering the halls looking for classmates.  THEY recall me passing out in my underwear and inviting fellow students into the room to enjoy the spectacle.  Perhaps both happened and I woke up and wandered the halls at a later time.  Who knows.

Another friend from both church and band was Michelle.  She was of Italian descent as I recall, and although we never dated we shared a passion for Muppets.  When they finally came to the big screen with The Muppet Movie in 1979 Michelle and I went to see it together at the theater.  We were late and the theater was packed with moms and kids.  We ended up on the front row, middle.  Strangely enough, we laughed more than the kids did.

One band trip we did was a concert band competition in Carlsbad, New Mexico.  I ran into some of my old classmates from Big Lake and got to speak briefly with Minnie Cortez.  I think it was that point in time where I developed a crush on her.  I’ve never been able to get her out of my mind ever since.  I have this horrible feeling that she is plump and making tortillas in some Mexican restaurant in west Texas but there’s always hope, right?  While we were there we did the obligatory tour of the caverns and ended up stuck in the elevator for about an hour.  I believe I slid out the back door into a storage area but there was no way out, so I climbed back in.  Eventually we got the front doors open and I helped hoist everyone up a bit until we had all crawled out.  A highlight of the trip, obviously.

Dancing isn’t very big in Baptist circles.  As a matter of fact, it’s downright forbidden in most Southern Baptist churches.  This really never came up in our house until we moved to Lake Worth.  My first year there a school dance was held and I was not allowed to go.  I was later told that there was some sort of incident involving alcohol and kids being suspended so I felt a bit better.  I certainly didn’t want to get mixed up with that crowd.  But the result of this was that all of my dancing was restricted to my living room while watching Soul Train and American Bandstand.  I did not even attend my Junior or Senior proms, mostly due to that same reason.

The summer after I graduated I attended one final youth camp.  For some reason this one was different, and I felt convicted of my past rebellious attitude and vowed to straighten up and fly right.  And I did.  Our home was probably one of the calmest, quietest households in the area but there was still tension there.  But that summer was perfectly tranquil.  I moved onto the campus of Dallas Baptist University before the school year started to do some work and earn some money.  I helped paint the bench areas for the baseball team and other miscellaneous clean-up projects.

I started that fall semester on a full-blown mission to be a minister.  One of the faculty advisors actually loaded me up with eighteen credit hours which included Greek.  Before the first month was up I had dropped that one.  My study habits were horrible.  I spent too much time in the rec room playing video games or ping pong and in the music hall or student union building playing the piano.  And then Lisa happened.

Lisa was amazing for many reasons.  She was just beautiful.  Her body was flawless, she had wavy brunette hair and a mole near her lip.  Think Cindy Crawford.  She was my own age, yet she singled me out to help her with her biology homework.  Being a naive male I did not recognize this for the obvious ploy that it was and just thought of it as a tribute to my genius.  The transition from study partner to make-out partner did not take long.

I was carless yet managed to beg and borrow cars as I could.  We would go to the music hall and hide out until the doors were locked and then make out.  We made out in the parking lot and in cars.  One time I made love to her in the basement of the library, in a storage area with dirt floors.  I still picture her lying on a piece of plywood as we practiced the early withdrawal method of birth control.  One time we drove to a subdivision that was still under construction and parked in a driveway.  At one point we took pictures of each other completely naked.  I can’t tell you how much I wish I still had those pictures, for reasons that may or may not be obvious.  They would capture my one wild non-religious girlfriend from the days of my youth, they would capture me in my youth, and it wouldn’t hurt to be in control of any sort of blackmail opportunities.  Lisa eventually graduated to older students and I went through my usual period of emotional turmoil.

I invested my emotions heavily into any one I was dating.  My songwriting reflected this and was utterly cheesy and depressing.  But I recovered and the next girl I got involved with was Sandi.  Sandi wasn’t from Texas like Lisa, Sandi was from Rhode Island and had the accent to match.  She was into drama and was more religious.  Sandi had straight blond hair and a curvy body.  She and Stan and I hung out a lot for awhile.  Stan was a drama queen, and yes I mean it that way.  I always remember riding in the car together, all three of us, singing along to the Broadway play Annie.  Any song from that soundtrack takes me back to those days.  We would often drive to downtown Dallas to City Hall and play around on these odd modern bronze sculptures that resembled vertebra.  At some point Sandi and I became romantic.  I was now dating a senior.

For various reasons we did not publicize our relationship as the awkwardness of it was obvious to both of us.  For starters the campus had not only curfews but a PDA policy (Public Display of Affection).  In other words, no public hugging and kissing unless you were married.  Of course this only magnified the amount of PDA (P as in Private) that occurred.  Sandi had a particular taste and smell that I noticed.  I couldn’t tell you what it was, some mixture of perfume and hormones and sweat or perhaps diet, but I liked it.  We made out a lot, and she is one of the first girlfriends I specifically remember enjoying the touch of my hand.  One particular time we were on a stairway leading from the Drama department on the top floor of the library to the roof.  Her pants were undone and she was reclining and enjoying my attention very much.  But at some point one of us noticed that she was on her period.  I was not particularly put off by this and went for paper towels.  Sandi, on the other hand, was apoplectic.  She kept letting out these long sobs and seemed rather traumatized.  I suspect it has something to do with her childhood, or perhaps that is just how she verbalizes extreme embarrassment, but it definitely put a damper on things.  I think it also caused her to sense both the age difference and the impropriety of our affair.  I don’t recall details of the timing but I don’t think we dated much longer after that.

My roommate Larry was from the bone-dry desert climate of eastern New Mexico and truly suffered in the humidity of northern Texas.